It was a good day of lifts for Irish weightlifter and YouTube personality Clarence Kennedy, who completed a massive clean & jerk of 490 pounds, or 222.5kg for a new personal record. He made the lift weighing 217 pounds or 98.7 kilograms, making this 2.25 times his bodyweight.
Kennedy told us a couple of years back that his best clean & jerk was 485 pounds (220kg) — it’s taken two years to add five pounds to his lift, but that’s how progression tends to work at the elite level. And this is indeed elite: it’s five pounds heavier than the American record in the -105kg class, a 485lb (220kg) lift made at the 1999 World Championships by Wes Barnett. (After the weight classes changed last year, no American has met the standards for a record in the new -102kg class: 218kg (480lb).)
Just to seal the deal, he finishes the lift with an impressive backflip. We think that one’s called a High X-Out Backflip because his legs go out to the side.
He wrote underneath his Instagram post,
222.5kg/490lbs Clean and Jerk at 98.7kg/217lbs bodyweight. Finally a PR! I also Cleaned 230kg/507lbs after this.
Kennedy is something of a jack of all trades because he’s a weightlifter/powerlifter/coach/self-proclaimed ‘tricker.’ That’s a type of acrobatics at which he’s astonishingly proficient. Check out some of his flips below.
We’ve also seen him do a pause back squat of 661.4 pounds/300kg, pause bench of 440.9 pounds/200kg, and deadlift of 749.5 pounds/ 340kg with straps. It’s worth emphasizing that he’s pulling off all of these feats while following a strict vegan diet — he explains in detail how he approaches his nutrition in this article.
He mentioned in a recent post how good he feels doing these Olympic lifts at a lighter bodyweight.
“Olympic lifts are so much better at this bodyweight compared to when I was 103-106kg/227-233lbs. Strength isn’t everything when it comes to the snatch and clean and jerk,” he wrote.
Kennedy has said that he has no interest in competing, but this new PR shows that he’s as driven as ever to improve his strength. We’re excited to see what other big lifts he crushes next.
Featured image from @clarencekennedy_ Instagram page.